Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect

I am sick of watching the children of Gaza being turned into one enormous accusation against Israel, as though this war began because Israel suddenly decided to fight children, while the ideology that has ruled Gaza, militarized its neighborhoods, indoctrinated generations, and deliberately embedded terrorism within civilian surroundings is conveniently removed from the picture.

The death of any child in war is horrific. There is nothing victorious about the body of a child, and no decent person should respond to such suffering without grief. Yet if the world genuinely cares about Gaza’s children, it must finally have the courage to examine the ideological environment Hamas created around them.

Hamas is not an ordinary political movement with a somewhat conservative religious platform. It is an extremist Islamist terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007, and its worldview cannot be understood by projecting comfortable Western assumptions onto it.

This is where the Western conversation repeatedly fails.

People sitting safely in Amsterdam, London, Brussels, or New York look at Gaza through their own moral framework and assume that everyone approaches life, death, childhood, warfare, and religious sacrifice in essentially the same way.

They do not, and acknowledging that is not racism. It is recognizing ideology.

The concept of martyrdom is central to extremist jihadist thought. Within that worldview, earthly existence is temporary while the afterlife is eternal. Paradise, forgiveness, religious honor, and eternal reward can consequently be presented as more important than survival itself.

When such beliefs are politically and socially glorified, the most basic human calculation is reversed. Survival is no longer necessarily presented as the highest priority, death for the cause can be celebrated as honor, and children can grow up surrounded by narratives in which terrorists and martyrs are elevated as heroes.

That matters enormously when trying to understand Gaza.

It does not mean that every Gazan thinks identically, nor does it make children responsible for the ideology imposed upon them. Quite the opposite. Children bear the least responsibility for the world adults build around them, which is precisely why their ideological exploitation is so unforgivable.

Hamas received approximately 44 percent of the vote in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election and secured a parliamentary majority through the electoral system, before violently taking control of Gaza in 2007. No comparable parliamentary election has since given today’s population an opportunity to approve or reject Hamas rule, but Hamas remains fully responsible for the terrorist infrastructure, indoctrination, and culture of martyrdom it subsequently cultivated.

Now look at Israel, where the contrast in values could hardly be more profound.

Jewish tradition places extraordinary value on human life, and Israel sends rescue teams around the world after earthquakes and disasters because saving life is deeply embedded in Israeli society. The same country routinely accused of indifference toward Gazan civilians has developed extensive procedures intended to reduce civilian casualties during military operations.

Israel has used Arabic leaflets, telephone calls, radio broadcasts, text messages, evacuation maps, and designated routes to warn civilians before attacks. Its procedures have included surveillance to determine whether civilians remain near a target, assessments of expected collateral damage, careful selection of weapons, and decisions to cancel operations when the anticipated civilian cost is judged too high.

Why would an army supposedly intent on killing civilians warn them to leave?

Why telephone people before attacking a military target, distribute evacuation maps, monitor whether civilians have departed, and sometimes abandon an attack because too many remain nearby?

These are uncomfortable questions for a world that has already decided what a photograph means before asking what happened before it was taken.

None of this means that every Israeli strike is perfect. War is not perfect, intelligence is not perfect, weapons are not perfect. and human beings are not perfect, especially when combat takes place in densely populated urban territory where Hamas deliberately operates among civilians.

However, civilian deaths and the deliberate murder of civilians are not synonymous. Erasing that distinction destroys the fundamental difference between a terrorist organization intentionally hunting civilians and an army attacking military objectives while taking precautions to reduce civilian harm.

The children of Gaza deserve better than becoming ammunition in somebody else’s ideological war. They deserve to grow up believing that their greatest achievement should be living, learning, creating, loving, and building a future.

They deserve adults who teach them that life is precious, not that martyrdom is glorious, and they deserve an international community courageous enough to condemn the ideology that turns death into victory instead of reflexively blaming Israel whenever that ideology produces another unbearable image.

If you genuinely care about Gaza’s children, ask who shaped the world into which they were born, what they were taught, who chose terrorism, and who transformed civilian territory into a battlefield.

The children of Gaza deserve life. Not martyrdom. Not Hamas. Life.

Sabine Sterk is the founder of the ngo Time To Stand Up For Israel.